FALL RIVER — When the gap between your age and the age of a high school student nears or exceeds 40 years, not even knowing who Lil Wayne is can erase the decades.

And in a big fieldhouse like the one at B.M.C. Durfee High School — with a sign on the locker room door reading “Swagger’s Back,” and the parquet floor crowded with students going from table to table at career day — it’s hard to convince yourself that you’re not back in your own past.

The kids, living their own present, are much given to laughter. Teenagers are famously moody, but the most common noise emanating from any group of teenagers is laughter; shy, nervous laughter or big whinnies of joy.

Career day at Durfee is kind of like a flea market of futures. On this Wednesday, I’m behind a big banner that says “Herald News,” handing out free copies of the paper and answering a wide variety of questions.

“Exactly what do you do?” a kid asks. His hair, pushed back and up by a headband, rises from his head like water from a fountain.

The questions are broad and they are narrow.

“How long does it take to print?”

“How much do you get paid?”

Good questions. Reporter questions, really, proving the urge to go and find out is not dead.

Looking around, watching the kids, I see the look just now is more clean cut than you might expect, the boys wearing their hair high and tight, the girls long and most often straight but clean.

Back packs cling to a lot of the students wandering from table to table, and the boys like hoodies, brand names, not as many sports team logos as you might think.

The Fall River Police Department is set up near the door to the fieldhouse, big, gleaming motorcycles balanced on delicate kickstands. I offer a cop $5 to start one of the bikes.

“I asked if I could do that,” he says. “They said no.”

There’s a good law enforcement presence, as well as a United States Marine Corps recruiter, who is from Maine, is six years into his service and hopes to return to Maine in 14 more years.

“I like interacting with the students,” he says, as we eat ham sandwiches in the high school’s Tradewinds Restaurant. “I like to help them, and I do help them, especially the ones that don’t have too much else going on.”

Although people sometimes tell you to remember “how lucky you are,” hardly anyone ever does, and the high school students are sometimes too busy for introspection.

Page 2 of 2 - But here, there is a long series of moments — as they ask me how much I’m paid, as they consider the Marine Corps — when the kids have to look back at high school even though they haven’t left yet.

Marc Munroe Dion’s “Side Streets” column draws on his knowledge of the area and his affection for the city where he was born. It’s about people and places and history and the voice that comes only from one corner of southeastern Massachusetts.